The Innocents

by Nette Hilton

  ‘That boy needs his mouth washed out with soap, that’s what he needs! He doesn’t even know what he’s talking about.’

  But Missie did.

  She knew what a perv was. And she knew what they did. Zilla had told her all about it and Zilla, by golly, would know.

  Missie knew something else as well.

  She knew for sure and certain, she knew with every single ounce of her being, that Oleksander wasn’t a perv.

  And she didn’t care who said so!

  32

  WINTER

  JULY

  It rained for two days and two nights. It didn’t stop. The gutters poured as much water over their sides as they sent flooding down onto the road. The roads filled up and made lakes of their own and the fields across the river filled up. Farmers moved cattle and men left town to go and help families who were flooded in. School was cancelled. Too many roads were cut and even the teachers couldn’t get in.

  And still it rained.

  Missie sat in her bedroom and read, and sat in her bedroom and knitted. Her mother put her in her raincoat and hat and gumboots and thick socks and took her to the library and then to have a cup of tea at the cafe in Main Street. It was to get them out of the house, she said, and any fresh air was better than no air at all except perhaps when it was freezing like it was and did Missie want a sausage roll and sauce with her tea?

  It was as if her mother stopped talking for too long the silence would fill up and drown them both. And it would have been nice to answer and help stop the empty spaces but Missie wasn’t sure if it was even necessary. Anyway, her mind was too full of rain and far too full of Deirdre.

  ‘No news yet?’ Dot Evans had stopped on her way out of the Astor.

  Her mother didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

  At times when reading failed and her knitting wasn’t growing fast enough she went to the bottom of the back stairs. The heat from the kitchen warmed the space around her feet while her back froze. It would have been nicer sitting by the stove but they stopped talking if she went in.

  So she only went in when there was nobody about and nothing to hear.

  ‘They’re saying...’ Dot Evans and Kathy Betts were having a cup of tea while her mother checked Kathy’s wedding dress plans. ‘They’re saying she’s been kidnapped.’

  Dot Evans had brought Kathy around under an enormous umbrella that made a puddle inside the back door when she arrived. According to her it wasn’t going to help if everybody simply downed tools because of a bit of rain although everyone knew what she really meant. It would be difficult, she’d said, but it was always best to keep going. She’d announced all this as she’d thrust Kathy through the door. Missie had stayed long enough to check out the picture of the dress and listen for the plans for flower girls and bridesmaids before her mother sent her upstairs.

  She’d gone and then continued along the top corridor and down the back steps.

  ‘...there was that other little pet. Remember? A little lad, shoved into the trunk of a car. Ages ago.’

  ‘I didn’t hear about that,’ Kathy said.

  Sometimes Missie was amazed by the adults who came to sit in the kitchen.

  Even she knew about that boy.

  Her mother reckoned Kathy filled her head with too many love story comics and there wasn’t much room for anything else. Missie wasn’t supposed to read them but she liked the pictures and the way their lips were drawn when they were kissing. She’d squirmed at the thought of kissing someone like that, lips all squished together, but let her mind drift around old love comics while she listened to Dot Evans talking about the boy who was kidnapped.

  ‘What’d he want him for anyway?’ Kathy asked. ‘Was he rich?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Dot said.

  Missie eased herself forward so she could peek around the corner of the cabinet. Dot was looking confused, like she’d turned a corner and found herself on the wrong path.

  ‘Don’t they take rich kids? You know, so they can get paid to give them back. What d’you call that again?’

  ‘Ransom,’ her mother said.

  ‘Lord, love a duck!’ Dot’s cup clattered to its saucer. ‘No, dear me, no. He wasn’t after ransom. It’ll be the same with this little one too. It doesn’t bare thinking about. Want stringing up, they do. By their balls! Castration’s too good for them.’

  ‘I don’t think you do that to actual men, Dot.’ Kathy spoke up. She had very round eyes and lovely black curls that creased in shiny waves down the side of her head. ‘It’s what you do to sheep, isn’t it?’

  Missie was about to leave. Her back was freezing and there wasn’t much worth listening too now if they were going to talk about sheep.

  ‘I reckon he knows more than he’s saying,’ Dot went on.

  ‘Who?’ It was the sharp edge of her mother’s voice that held Missie in place.

  ‘Him upstairs. Your Mr Oleksander Whatever-his-nameis, as you call him.’

  Her mother didn’t speak but Missie could easily imagine the way her mouth would be set in a straight line.

  ‘You mark my words, Marcie. There’s something odd about that one. And I’m not just saying that because he’s a foreigner. At least he’s not dark like some of the ones they’re letting in. Italians and the like.’ She made a little snorting noise. ‘There’s definitely something very peculiar about the way he hangs about down at the river. And the kids know he was there. What was he doing anyway?’

  ‘He was probably writing. Or drawing. Or maybe he was just thinking about home.’

  ‘Well, this is his home now. He’s got no right to be hanging around like he does. Lurking, if you ask me. Looking for an opportunity to have his way with some poor thing.’

  ‘They do that in some countries don’t they?’ Kathy said as Missie eased herself back onto the step.

  There was silence for a moment as if they were busy trying to work out what Kathy meant.

  Missie peeked around the corner.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, like in the war. They were always doing ... that ... to women, weren’t they.’

  ‘It was wartime,’ her mother said. ‘The war’s over now.’

  ‘Yes, well, that may be so but I don’t think any woman’s safe any more.’ It was Dot’s voice. ‘Not while there’s pervs allowed to live in our country.’

  ‘They’re not perverts,’ Missie’s mum said. ‘And Oleksander Shevchenko especially isn’t.’

  ‘What would we know?’ Dot’s chair clattered as she stood. She’d be getting another cuppa. Drank a pot if you let her, her mother said. ‘He’s probably done something wrong and they’ve sent him out here to get him off the hook. That’s what happened in the early days. Families sent their sons out here as officers in the army to get them out of gambling debts and things like that. And there’d be other things too awful to even think about...’

  A cup rattled onto its saucer.

  ‘Oleksander is a nice man who’s alone in the world.’ Her mother had taken a deep breath. It was easy to tell. She was using the same voice she used to get her message across when Missie wasn’t getting it. ‘All I know is that he was in a camp of some sort and had to escape. It was communists this time, and before that Germans coming and then going. There was no peace in his country.’ The pattern pieces on the table were shushed about. ‘His parents had died, I think. I don’t know much about it really...’

  ‘Oh, that’s horrible...’ Kathy said quietly.

  Nobody said anything for a while. The kitchen clock ticked and a log in the fireplace stirred and fell.

  ‘It is horrible,’ her mother finally said. ‘But it’s worse when you think how awful it would be to be so alone right here. Nobody knowing your language or what sort of country you’ve come from. What sort of life you’ve had...’

  ‘It’s like I was saying...’ Dot Evans sparked up. ‘We don’t know anything about them.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Dot! I’ve never heard such twaddle. H
ere, Kathy, let me have a go at that fabric before you crumple it to threads...’

  Missie couldn’t bear to hear any more.

  She thought about the lovely card he’d made her. And the story of the river.

  Slowly she climbed back up the stairs. She’d find that card now and hold it. She thought perhaps she might be holding it to warm it, to take the chill of a deep river out of its memory.

  And then she thought maybe she was just holding it for something to hold onto while she waited for Deirdre to come back.

  33

  JULY

  ‘CHARMAINE’

  On the third day the rain eased. The sky still sulked and occasionally lashed the windows to prove it still could, and just might, but the wind had begun to drop. Leaves on the trees hung themselves out to dry and the trees stood like exhausted athletes at the end of a race, wet and sagging.

  From the window seat in Max’s room Missie could see a row of cars as searchers continued to scour the bush and the river. Max was busy behind her working out a new route for his trains.

  He was just as busily ignoring her. This time, though, Missie was happy to be ignored.

  She’d sat for a while, her breath fogging the glass. She wiped it clean when it got too hard to see out.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Max sat back on his heels.

  ‘None of your business,’ Missie answered quietly. She couldn’t be bothered answering at all really and would have let it go, except Max would have kept it up.

  ‘She shouldn’t have been down there anyway.’

  Goosebumps whispered across Missie’s neck. She didn’t turn around.

  ‘How d’you know she was down there?’ Her heart was beginning to pound like she might just uncover something unpleasant, like turning over a rock and finding a shiny black snake coiled beneath it.

  ‘Of course she was down there. Her bike was up the top. Anybody’d know she was going down the river. And we didn’t even invite her.’

  Missie tried to put the rock back, to cover the snake and its scaly blackness so it would be easier to pretend that she had never glimpsed it.

  ‘We did. She went to get Jimmy. She was invited.’

  Max went back to his tracks. ‘She was a thief anyway.’

  Goosebumps again. And the cold path of ghostly fingers across her cheeks.

  ‘What would you know!’ She stood up and kicked at one of the tracks, collapsing it in the middle and sending a buckle right down the line. Max lunged at her, swiping at her legs with the metal track he had in his hand and managing to scratch a thin line of blood before she was across the floor and out the door. If she’d been slower he’d have cut her – she knew it and so did he. Quickly she opened the door and stuck her thumb up at him. Her mother’d kill her if she found out she was doing it but Max was asking for it.

  She slammed the door and heard the thump of something heavy crash against it. She hoped it was an engine, one of his good ones, and she hoped it was smashed to smithereens. She went down to the kitchen to dob, and to make sure she was going to get a fair hearing, poked and squeezed some more blood out of her scratched knee.

  And if Aunt Belle didn’t like it, bugger her.

  ‘For goodness sake, Missie!’ Her mother rounded the corner with her arms full of towels. ‘Don’t pick at that. You’ll get blood all over the place and I’m having enough trouble trying to get these towels dry now. Place looks like a Chinese laundry.’

  ‘I didn’t do it! Max hit me with the train!’

  ‘And what did you do to Max to make him do that?’

  Missie hurried after her. The towels were looped across each other on the kitchen table. A clothes horse was sagging under the weight of more towels at one end of the stove and her mother was busy stringing up a line under the mantelpiece for these ones.

  ‘Here.’ Her mother thrust three towels at her that wouldn’t fit on her new line. ‘Go and put these over the screen in the sitting room. And make sure you close the door. Belle’ll have a fit if she comes home and sees us drying things in there. Make sure you remind me to get them out before she comes in, but the fire’s on and it might as well be useful. Oh...’ She paused and lifted Missie’s skirt away from her scratch. ‘Don’t let them dangle in that for heaven’s sake.’ Quickly she licked the corner of her hanky and wiped it clean. ‘That’s better. And you stay away from Max. All right?’ She brushed at a hair that had come loose from one of her combs. ‘I know he can be horrible but you just have to get along...’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Just stay out of his way, Missie. Come on, I’ve asked you before and you’ve managed. And right now, well, everyone’s feeling pretty upset and worried. We don’t want you squabbling and making it worse.’

  For a second longer, Missie stood there, in front of her mother and inside the warmth of the kitchen. It was there, wasn’t it, slithering out from under its rock in the back of her mind. It should be said, that awful dark thing that really didn’t have words to describe it.

  Now, though, wasn’t going to be the time.

  ‘Good girl.’ Swiftly her mother leaned over and kissed her on the top of her head. ‘It’s not forever,’ she said and propelled her out into the cold hallway.

  While she hung the towels over the screen and enjoyed the warmth of the front-room fire, Missie thought about Max and his train set upstairs and how she’d like to trample and crush every single train, carriage track and wheel. He got away with everything.

  She turned to warm her back and discovered she was standing like poor old Allan Mae. He never visited any more since...

  She turned around again, lifting her hands and warming the palms and seeing the fire light up the tips of her fingers.

  ...Judith. Not since Judith Mae.

  She turned her hands, watching the shadows on her fingers change from pale pink to crimson to deep shadow and let Judith walk around in her mind. Suddenly she saw how Judith stood, belly out, finger up her nose or in her mouth. She saw how her mouth could set and her face slowly change to deep red to white as she held her breath.

  She could almost hear her voice. And she remembered a time when she was learning how to knit when she’d turned to find Judith watching her from the doorway of her room. ‘Can I play wif you?’ she’d said, so softly, and then pointed her fat, moist finger at the knitting that was strewn across the floor. ‘Can you show me how?’

  Judith had squatted, knees up and hands clasped on top of them while Missie had tried to show her. Finally she’d given up and shown her French knitting instead. And not once, not one time in the whole long afternoon when Missie explained and tried to make her short fingers lift the stitch over the little nail, not even when she was getting tired of always putting the stitch back on and squeezed one finger a bit too hard, not once did Judith whinge or complain.

  ‘Can I keep it please, Mithie?’ she’d said when it was time to go home. She always said her ‘S’s wrong. And she’d taken the little Knitting Nancy home and Allan Mae had promised she’d return it.

  She never did.

  But she did bring some fluffy wool around another time to get Missie to show her how to knit all over again.

  Fluffy wool like the wool in her little yellow cardigan...

  ‘Missie!’ Her mother’s call.

  ...the cardigan that Max had taken.

  ‘Missie!’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  The cardie that Max had taken. She wondered where it was now and, as she closed the sitting room door, thought how lucky it was that she hadn’t dobbed too much on Max. There’d be all sorts of trouble if Max suddenly got mad and gave that cardie to his mother.

  She could almost see him. ‘Missie had it hidden in her room,’ he’d say.

  And then they’d come and ask her all about Judith again and she could feel panic moving into her throat as she stood in the hallway right about the spot where Judith had landed.

  ‘Someone to see you,’ her mother said as she pulled the kitchen door ope
n to hurry her through. ‘Stop standing around like a statue of what’s-the-use. Didn’t you hear me call?’

  Beyond her mother Missie caught a glimpse of Jimmy Johnson. He’d been stood by the fire between the drying towels and he was surrounded by steam. Some of it was rising from his hair and Missie was reminded of a dog they’d once brought in from the rain.

  ‘I’ll go and find some dry clothes for you, Jimmy,’ her mother was saying. ‘And then you can both rug up with a couple of raincoats and boots and go and buy me a pound of sugar so I can make us some custard to go with dinner tonight.’

  Missie climbed onto a chair and leaned across the table. ‘You got pretty wet.’

  Jimmy tried to smile at her. She knew it was a try because usually when you smile it just happens. It’s there and then it changes and you talk or you shout or something.

  But this was a try because it was all shaky and then, halfway through, Jimmy Johnson did something Missie had never seen any boy at school ever do.

  He cried.

  Not big sobby, baby noises. It was worse than that.

  There were just big, silent tears that slid down his nose to quiver at the end like overripe plump plums. He dropped his head forward so she couldn’t see but it didn’t stop those fat plummy tears catching the light as they fell.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Missie slid her arms back and drifted around to the corner of the table. She stayed there, not sure if she should go any closer.

  He lifted his head long enough to look at her then turned his face to his shoulder and wiped it clean with the sleeve of his damp-smelling jumper.

  He turned back and opened his mouth. Words didn’t tumble out like they should have.

  ‘What? I can’t hear you...’ Missie moved a little closer, trailing her hand along the smooth, warm edge of the table.

  ‘She’s dead.’

  His arm had come up to cover his eyes as if he was shielding himself from something he didn’t want to see.

  ‘Deirdre?’ Her voice was a whisper. A croak. She thought she heard her mother return but she seemed to have frozen in time, a little behind her and just at the edge of her vision. ‘Do you mean Deirdre?’